All Yesterdays Parties - essay

I Why Balloons?
II Why a Party?
III Why ‘A Celebration on the Uncelebrated’?

I. Why Balloons?
An accumulation of inflatables is floating free on the ceiling of Carnival’s upstairs bar. Ideas adrift. A firmanment of propositions, nudging off and rubbing up against one another. This is All Yesterday’s Parties a collaborative entity of helium balloons customised by many artists and some non artists – addressing the themes of: art & parties; celebrating the uncelebrated; alternative viewing and presentation strategies for art and even the social / conversational turn in recent visual arts practice.

Taking work of the walls and compelling viewers to look elsewhere, has some grand precidents. For sure All Yesterday’s Parties is a more modest indoor weather system of white helium balloon ‘clouds’ – but it might be nice to regard it as the baby cousin (many times removed) of Olafur Eliasson’s Tate Modern Weather Project.

Likewise the show can be flattered by linking it to art historical strands: in the 19’teens the design of constructivist exhibitions, Kurt Switters Merzbau 1920’s environments; Marcel Duchamp’s installations for exhibitions of Surrealist work in the 30’s and 40’s in New York 1200 Bags of Coal or A Mile of String; in the 1950’s Arman and Yves Klien respectivly completely filling and emptying the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris; in the 1960’s Warhol’s silver balloons – and all the conceptual and minimailist strategies there after. Or maybe it’s a return to the neck craning hangs of 19th academic salon shows – where works were hung hugga-mugga floor to ceiling?

II Why a Party?
All Yesterday’s Parties is presented for one night only at a party of the same name (26 August 2005). There’s a bar, a DJ and projections of party snap shots and party sequences from cinematic classics. Funny that, the sames names for different things and titleing a party, a night – declaring the whole thing ‘art’. It hardly needs to be said that its named in quasi tribute the famous Velvet Underground / Nico song. So there’s an ironic reference to 1960’s New York Art world decadence – but this is a wee 21st century shin dig in the upstairs room of a bar in Dublin.

The event is pitched as “a works ‘do’ for an atomised community of art workers” While artists in this town are hardly starved of social events, with a near bi-weekly round of openings, at this event the party doesn’t compromise the art – and the art doesn’t get in the way of the party. Floating above our heads the artworks are safe from harm – the works can be drawn down, accessed and contemplated. And guilt-free, the business of art can put temporarily to the (up)side. Niether the art or the party are a pretext for one another, they get an equal billing.

Parties are more & more an important aspect of the artworld. On the one hand it’s a lamentable symptom of the glamourisation and commidification of contemporary art, whereby art – the new sex, drugs and rock & roll– is promoted as the ultimate in luxery goods. As Brian O’Doherty wonders in his preface to Space: Architecture for Art have artworks become, “… emblems of capital, certifying the acceptibility of greed, to which a kind of mystical, quasi spiritual aura is now attached, as it is to the museum itself?” (2).

On the other, art practices that take the form of, or facilitate social events and discussion is seen by some as a critical and political gesture. As one Thomas More has written in the Frieze magazine letters page “ recently I have sensed a more radical spirit in the air and am accordingly working on a show concerning relational trends in art practice entitled ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’, which will be supported by a symposium I have organised ‘Chin-Wag: The Rematerialisation of Chat in Contemporary Art Practice’”(3). This is a swipe at the ‘relational aesthetics’ of curator / critic Nicholas Bouriard and the practices of artists such as Rirkit Tiravanija and Thomas Hirshorn.

To claim that ‘All Yesterdays parties’ possesses or claims ‘relational’ status would be to ludicrously over egg the mix with too much theoro-critical discourse. But it is another type of folly to underestimate the potential of pitching levity against high seriousness for generating interesting ideas and compelling conversations.

Parties can be very important – in Korea, for example much has been made of the impact of the club scene on a emergent generation of artists and as a motor for and reflection of, the liberalisation of the country (4). And we can we think on the significance of how the Beastie Boys’ 80’s frat-boy mantra “(You gotta) Fight for your right – To Party” was both contradicted and augmented in meaning when their record label mates Public Enemy recorded “Party for your right to fight”

Then again and again. ‘Free floatingness’ is a position open to criticism. Terry Eagleton reminds us in his book After Theory (5) not to forget that, all the ideas that inform our understanding of contemporay culture: marxism, post –structuralism, feminism and and post-colonial thought were laboured over and brought to fruition principally as a means of ensuring just and equitable existances for oppressed peoples – not just as a clever way to ‘defer meaning’ and skirt around the issues in relation to art practices and objects.

III Why celebrate the un-celebrated?
How, then about some art, that doesn’t ‘float’, that know’s where it stands? Well we’re in tricky times – consumer culture and the market has pretty much hi-jacked the language of creativity and indeed rebellion. Sony has the slogan ‘go create’. Capital runs free and un-regulated. Nowadays ‘break the rules’ and ‘revolt’ are most likely to be found as chapter headings in a bestseller on economics. And hasn’t even the notion of colectivity has been co-opted – we’re just a mass of consumers now?

Rebecca Solnit is a writer who can help us see beyond this doomladen po-mo future-cast. She argues that we must value the fact that change comes slowly, through small steps, that might not seem significant at the time (6). Therefore, despite what leftists of the old school might argue – that capitalism has it all sewn up and that resistance has be co-opted and anticipated, meaningful protest and change IS possible. As access to public space, wandering and rambling is her field of interest, in particualr Solnit emphaises that, being in public and stating your position – at a street party or march – is a small victory, one worthy of record. ‘All Yesterdays’ Parties’ is an invitation to affirm these otherwise un-celebrated digging-ins of heels and a few short steps forward.

Another why and wherefore is to be found in the underlying premise of a previous Workroom project, the exhibition ‘Elsewhere from here’, curated by Cora Cummins, (4 - 20 Dec 2003). The show brought together a number of artist practices that articulated alternative spaces, principally 'patches of calm' that permitted in various ways contemplative reflection in the otherwise frenetic, image saturated inviolable edifice of contemporary urban culture. Painter Fergus Feelhily says some thing similar in his artist’s book A Venn Notebook: “How do you make work that is potent? We live in a culture where everybody has a certain level of slickness around then that they didn’t have ten years ago … and that maybe is why a lot of art has become quite rough. It looks like it’s almost cack-handed. I think it relates to this issue of how does art survive and still be potent.”(7)

So where does this leave us? Let me re-cast the words of Prince’s 1999 as an apologia for the way critical art writings end inconclusivly and to much in the negative. I was dreaming when I wrote this, so forgive me if I’ve gone astray. When I woke up this morning and I (really must have) thought it was Judgement Day.

Time to lighten up – like helium is lighter than air. Scoops?


Jason Oakley


(1) P-art-ying: Julian Stallabrass on arts monied parties. Art Monthly May 2005